If it pans out, is it a source of life or is it what keeps life that is already there functioning?

"So audacious was Marcus Bray's experiment that even he feared it would fail." ... "The study swapped out all its magnesium, tabula rasa, and showed that the system, centering on the ribosome, would have thrived basically as it is today 4 billion years ago at the foundations of life on Earth."

And the last quote: "Eat your magnesium; it's good for you." From those quotes comes my question above.

Georgia Tech. We used to sing a song about Georgia Tech. But that's another topic. I wait to hear the experts' take on the experiment.

If it pans out, is it a source of life or is it what keeps life that is already there functioning?

"So audacious was Marcus Bray's experiment that even he feared it would fail." ... "The study swapped out all its magnesium, tabula rasa, and showed that the system, centering on the ribosome, would have thrived basically as it is today 4 billion years ago at the foundations of life on Earth."

And the last quote: "Eat your magnesium; it's good for you." From those quotes comes my question above.

Georgia Tech. We used to sing a song about Georgia Tech. But that's another topic. I wait to hear the experts' take on the experiment.

Not a source of life but evidence that the cellular protein-building machine (the ribosome) could be ancient enough to have been working already in the primordial Earth, when Fe and Mn were the dominant cations around, rather than Mg as used today.

It also shows (something creationists absolutely hate ) that this system is very robust to change - in this change to the cation type used, which helps a lot if one is constructing a hypothesis for how life began, as it provides more degrees of freedom as to what might have happened and in what order.

Not a source of life but evidence that the cellular protein-building machine (the ribosome) could be ancient enough to have been working already in the primordial Earth, when Fe and Mn were the dominant cations around, rather than Mg as used today.

It also shows (something creationists absolutely hate ) that this system is very robust to change - in this change to the cation type used, which helps a lot if one is constructing a hypothesis for how life began, as it provides more degrees of freedom as to what might have happened and in what order.

Interesting post, Hazel, thanks.

Thank you very much. That's the picture I was getting. As for being robust to change and that helping in the study of how life began, is it possible that being able to use many different cations might also contribute to evolution? Say, using Mg instead of Fe and Mn could bring about a changes in the existing form of life? Ex: The brain grows larger; Man walks upright; consciousness develops; on and on.

The early earth had a bunch of features no longer present today that might have promoted the processes that led to life that aren't usually mentioned in the origin-of-life literature. First, there were a great deal more radioactive species and amounts of these than today, just because many fewer half-lives had passed since our solar system formed from a gaseous nebula, possibly (probably) enriched by local supernovae. Radioactivity provides energy to the chemical system, even at times free electrons via beta decay. The lack of free oxygen, combined with the late heavy bombardment, means that a lot of metals remained in their native metallic state on the surface, broken down by erosional processes and so presenting huge reaction surface area. Many transition and rare-earth metals exhibit good coordination chemistry, and might have taken the place of fixed catalytic activity we see today with enzymes, even before any possible ribozymes. The moon, being so much closer to the earth, produced much more frequent and much larger tides, which could have mixed all kinds of materials near shorelines far inland and back out again. Beach sands could have been stratified with the heavier metals (many radioactive) occupying the underlayers, and reacting materials washing in and out over them.

Obviously this would have been long before the rise of ribosomes, or ribozymes generally, or proteins. But it might have set the stage for their ultimate development.

The early earth had a bunch of features no longer present today that might have promoted the processes that led to life that aren't usually mentioned in the origin-of-life literature. First, there were a great deal more radioactive species and amounts of these than today, just because many fewer half-lives had passed since our solar system formed from a gaseous nebula, possibly (probably) enriched by local supernovae. Radioactivity provides energy to the chemical system, even at times free electrons via beta decay. The lack of free oxygen, combined with the late heavy bombardment, means that a lot of metals remained in their native metallic state on the surface, broken down by erosional processes and so presenting huge reaction surface area. Many transition and rare-earth metals exhibit good coordination chemistry, and might have taken the place of fixed catalytic activity we see today with enzymes, even before any possible ribozymes. The moon, being so much closer to the earth, produced much more frequent and much larger tides, which could have mixed all kinds of materials near shorelines far inland and back out again. Beach sands could have been stratified with the heavier metals (many radioactive) occupying the underlayers, and reacting materials washing in and out over them.

Obviously this would have been long before the rise of ribosomes, or ribozymes generally, or proteins. But it might have set the stage for their ultimate development.